Short Synopsis: A girl who misses her train calls Jigoku Tsuushin.
Overall Enjoyment Value: 7,5/10 (Usual revenge, but Yuzuki is finally coming in action!)
And with this episode, everything suddenly becomes clear: Yuzuki was indeed meant to be the next Tsugumi, and she’s also going to play Hajime by trying to stop the revenges in the rest of this season because of what happened to her best friend. It’s definitely a better motivation than Hajime had, who simply was fundamentally against revenges. Yuzuki, instead, has a very good reason to hate Ai.

This episode played with the anxieties that the elite have about their reputations. I liked how the lead girl in this episode may have been a bright student with good grades, but she nevertheless was a normal girl. I’ve lost count of how many great students in anime have been portrayed as the perfect human beings, brilliant at every thing they do. While the lead girl did know how to avoid the biggest kinds of trouble, she did put her trust into someone who later turned out to be a criminal and ended up sending him to hell when a picture of both of them was taken that could have damaged her reputation. I actually had a lot of respect for the two of them before the creators went and showed the huge weaknesses of the both of them. ^^;

The interesting thing is how the creators are going to play in the future episodes, with Yuzuki trying to prevent Ai from taking her revenges. Compared to Hajime, she’s really shy and not very charismatic, and that guy failed nearly every time trying to convince characters that were a lot more sane than the people we’ve been seeing in the third season. I’d also love it if the creators threw in a bunch of psychopaths in front of her. Yuzuki has a lot of potential to grow, and I’m really curious to see where the creators plan to go with her.

Birdy the Mighty Decode 2

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets assigned to track down a bunch of escaped convicts.
Chance of me Blogging: 100% (Hell yeah!)
Whoa, a bit theme of the sequels this season seems to be angsting over what happened at the end of its previous season: first Shikabane Hime, then Druaga no Tou, and now this one. Still, Birdy the Mighty did this the best of the three, simply because it had so many other things to do in this episode so that Senkawa didn’t have too much time to remember Nakasugi. And unlike the previous two, this series has yet to show what it can really do with its potential. This episode promised a grand story, lots of new characters were introduced and some characters who seemed as mere fillers in the first season show up again as well. The new OP and ED are also much better, there’s a brand new OST, so overall all signs point in the direction that the second season is going to be much better than the first. Just, what was up with that strange insert song at the end?

Major 5th Season

Short Synopsis: Our lead character spent the fourth season in a foreign country and finally arrived back home, it seems.
Chance of me Blogging: 10% (Yet to see the first four seasons…)
Seriously, is there no end to the sequels this Winter-season? In any case, I watched this episode in an attempt to get motivated to watch the first season. So, it’s a bit unfortunate that there was hardly any baseball whatsoever in this episode, but nevertheless I enjoyed the quiet mood of the episode. The characters were nostalgic about things that I obviously never saw, but it nevertheless was an enjoyable episode. I might try to follow this fifth season, depending on how long it remains interesting to me and whether it can prove to be significantly different from One Outs (since two baseball shows airing at the same time may be a bit too much).

Kemono no Souja Erin

Short Synopsis: Our lead character gets is the daughter of a famous dragon caller
Chance of me Blogging: 50% (It would be 100% if it wasn’t for the producers)
Now this is what I’m talking about! This series is definitely the most creative and original out of the new shows that aired this season. I love the stylized look of the main character, or the very stylish animation when the dragons attacked. The slice of life moments in this series were also wonderful, though there’s one big problem with this series: its creators. I took a small look at the different staff members that are working on this series and it looks like we’ve got the worst people on the Production IG-arsenal working on it: Trans Arts. While I liked Wellber when it aired, I now see that it was way too cheesy, Toshokan Sensou was unbalanced and Chocolate Underground was just plain bad, and they still get to produce series? Why hasn’t Production IG simply fired them, and more importantly: what happened to their good people? Did they all quit at the same time to join Madhouse, or something? I loved this episode, but I can already see it going downhill: the series composition was done by the guy who did the series composition of Real Drive and Blood, and the production coordination was done by the guy who did the production coordination of Saiunkoku Monogatari and The Twelve Kingdoms: all excellent stories on themselves, but the former two were really unbalanced, and the latter two had no conclusion, and I have enough reasons to believe that these people were directly responsible for their series’ respective flaws. Just think what might happen once you combine them all into one series!